The story of Africans being brought to the Americas, mainly in bondage, is well known. The transatlantic slave trade has been exhaustively mined and narrated and, if the plot is misunderstood, one only needs to peruse the history books for clarity. We know relatively little, though, about African-Americans and their voyages back to the other […] More »

Several people were injured in Rome yesterday when two letter bombs were thrown into a gay neighbourhood bar. The attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of escalating violence against gay people in Italy which some speculate has been fuelled by the election of Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, a member of the […] More »

I met you in a hostel in Rennes. The weather was humid and this made the door stick: I threw my weight against it and fell into the room. Your pink sandals and your pack were lying in a corner and you were there, too: asleep. Eyes turned toward the window. I had to walk […] More »

The drought in Northern Kenya this year is severe. Farah Olad, the Deputy Chief of Party of Education for Marginalized Children of Kenya (EMACK), an organization which works with Somali pastoral communities, tells me grey is the “color of death” in this rural region. And the whole landscape is grey: from the ground to the […] More »

“You know that here in Colombia, there are many human-rights violations,” says José Oney Valencia Llanos, who earns his living cutting sugar cane in Colombia’s fertile Cauca Valley. “Business people, through multinational and transnational corporations, have violated human rights and attacked workers, directly and indirectly.” Oney told me this on a humid afternoon in El […] More »

As the wheels hit the hot asphalt of the runway, I look up to see the frenetic expressions on the faces of my fellow passengers—a look that falls somewhere between anxious and anaphylactic, and it’s clear they’re desperate to get off the plane. It’s been a short and relatively painless flight from Nairobi, Kenya, to […] More »

The idea of supplying hydro power to poor communities came to Nyaga Ndiga after hours spent by the river grinding millet. He was inspired to try the same concept—friction—to produce energy. In a country where only 4 per cent of the population can afford electricity, Ndiga was uncovering an untapped market: cheap, sustainable, community-owned rural […] More »

I’m back in Scotland this month, for my first trip home since Christmas. Coming home is always incredible — a constant onslaught of the long-lost familiar — but being back also reminds me of some of the reasons I left in the first place. I could give you a few of those, but lurking behind […] More »

Year-round, Mama Agnes feeds a family of six with a comparatively 100 square-metre plot of land. She stands in her backyard garden, an oasis of green in a landscape left yellow and cracked by the hot sun. She points to tomato plants heavy with still-green fruits, sukuma (kale), onions, and spinach. Mama Agnes is currently […] More »

On Christmas Eve, 1989, Charles Taylor’s band of rebels stormed the small border village of Butuo, Liberia, taking over the police station and sparking a civil war. Chief Inspector Morris Gonylee waves dismissively at the state of ruin the station now lies in, a common sight in a nation struggling to rebuild from this 14-year […] More »

When you’re talking international development, words matter There’s nothing like an all-purpose label to bring comfort and order to an otherwise overwhelming world. But what’s comforting to one person can be downright offensive to another. When it comes to the language used to label the “non-Western” world, quotation marks just won’t cut it anymore. What’s […] More »